Chapter 61 — The Frozen Tide
The Herdsman of the Wasteland · Page 2 of 3
Shen Mu started slightly and looked upstream, and saw that the water surging toward him was redder still than what lay downstream! "Young Master, there are corpses on the river!
" Snow Fox cried out suddenly.
Shen Mu saw the corpse too, but made no sound. He looked upstream and saw more corpses drifting toward them. Great fish lurked below, river beasts churning at the surface, throwing up sheets of spray and seizing the chance to feed on the bodies -- a great clamor of it.
Shen Mu opened his Heaven-Reaching Eye and saw the face of a head bobbing up and down in the water. His body gave a slight shudder: these corpses were none other than the travelers who had passed through Green Cloud Valley earlier!
The river rolled on, its blood color deeper, and even the floating ice was stained red.
A hundred corpses could not have done this!
The Surging River is vast, more than ten li across, its waters swift and fierce; the blood of a hundred or so people could not redden it.
Shen Mu's expression froze: he saw the tide of corpses pouring down from upstream!
Not merely a tide of corpses -- a tide of ice-corpses, over a thousand bodies mixed with blocks of floating ice!
These people must all have been the powerful ones who lay in ambush for that general. Their numbers were great; they had gone upstream in batches, meaning to set formations and lie in wait, and the general had cut them down!
That they formed an ice-corpse tide meant their deaths had come nearly at the same moment!
They died almost simultaneously, slain by that general or by the masters aboard the tower ship!
Shen Mu steadied himself. This was the first time he had seen such a hideous slaughter -- grimmer even than the day he followed Granny Zhu out to another village to deliver a baby, and came upon a village put to the sword.
In those years the sight had frightened his soul right out of his body, and Granny Zhu had snatched it back. Now, though he was a martial artist, the sight still shook his soul.
Too cruel.
The young general of Jingping was so powerful, so ruthless. If Jingping's iron cavalry came to the Wasteland, what a blow would it deal to this wild land?
Shen Mu shook his head to drive out the unease and said to Snow Fox, "Don't go out drinking these days, and tell your sisters to keep quiet and stay indoors. " Snow Fox nodded again and again.
Though she was a demon, the scene before her had frightened her too.
"Ling'er, go back first and find your sisters.
I'll go down and take a look, lest these corpses pile up into a lake dammed by a thousand dead! " With that Shen Mu leapt down, ran along the cliff wall all the way to the river below, and then went striding over the water.
The corpses and the floating ice gathered more ice as they passed, rolling on downstream.
Shen Mu soon caught up with the ice-corpse tide and saw it growing larger and larger, ice crashing against ice with a crack-crack, the corpses squeezed by the ice into severed limbs and broken arms that floated atop the floes. He ran along the river for several tens of li, and the floating ice on the surface had already become an iceberg, hung with mutilated corpses -- a terrible sight. The ice tide and the iceberg grew heavier and higher, moving slowly; even the water surging down was blocked, and the river behind rose higher and higher. Shen Mu frowned.
The Surging River still ran straight now, but when it reached the oasis where Sang'e was, the river turned; the floating ice would not get through and would jam there, forming a barrier lake. The water would pile up higher and higher, and the ice too, until at last it stood a hundred zhang high, heaped up there!
And when the ice tide and the iceberg could bear no more, they would collapse and shatter, and a great flood would sweep away everything, devouring all along its path; man and beast alike would be carried off by the flood! Many of the Wasteland's villages were built by the river, the better to travel.